Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to You're right in the broad sense, of course. I wonder if that was the case here.

The Conqueror Worm, Ouroboros
ER — (archived)

These guys were doing each other's laundry and selling each other pizza, on credit. Actually, there's no real food or clothing involved, just coupons.

Nobody anywhere was actually making anything, in fact, how could they? If you want a shoelace these days you have to get it shipped from China. These guys were working at a level of abstraction and symbology that had nothing to do with goods and services and products and jobs. It is a phony world of shadows and electric money transfers that has nothing to do with economics, with work and materials and labor and management.

Think about what precipitated this crisis, people trading IOUs for IOUs and using the IOUs to loan out to collect still more IOUs. Of course, it pays better and is more fun than actually putting together the labor, resources, facilities and management to produce something useful and going out into the marketplace and competing to sell it. This is the snake swallowing itself, but sooner or later it winds up eating its own head.

The purpose of finance capital is to provide credit to business so that the money needed to make money is available in a steady stream, not in spurts. These parasites were selling (and renting!) each other money
without any concern for the fact that capital is only a symbol, a means of keeping score, not a commodity in itself.

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